If you want to rape a 12-year-old girl and have the authorities give you a wink and a thumbs-up, Saudi Arabia is the place for you.

The Saudis really need to get an infomercial out there — and the Nation magazine and other leftist sites that apologize for Islamic gender apartheid can feature it on their webpages. It would go something like this:

A Saudi sheikh dressed slickly in Saudi garb would be sitting confidently in a chair, looking into the camera with an excited smile. He would then begin asking, with earnestness and an encouraging tone:

Are you a pedophile? Do you like underage girls? Would you like to rape one of them — or several? And get away with it? Even have it legally sanctioned? Then Saudi Arabia is for you.

The screen then shifts to a shopping mall filled with niqab-covered women (only the slit of the eyes showing) walking up and down in front of stores. It remains unclear what message this is supposed to denote, but the camera stays focused on these shrouded women for about ten seconds. Then a warning appears that all infidels who are interested must first convert to Islam. This is followed by a phone number appearing over a black background, indicating a contact person who can be reached. A voice then explains that this person lurks within the Saudi religious police and that he will connect interested parties to Saudi fathers intent on selling their underage girls into marriage — a standard practice in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi fathers, you see, they know what’s up: it’s better to sell one’s daughter at a very young age to get raped under the sanctioning of Islamic law than to risk her getting older and bringing shame to the family — which can happen in a million ways in Saudi Arabia (i.e., she might go outside without permission or attempt to run out of a burning building unveiled). This all gets too needlessly complicated — as you then have to kill her. So why go through all the trouble when you can make some cash while she’s young and get rid of the problem?

After the phone number is flashed on the screen, the infomercial ends with a little talk from Jasem Muhammad al-Mutawah, Saudi Arabia’s infamous “expert” on Islamic “family matters.” He’s holding one of his favorite rods and begins to explain and gleefully demonstrate with it how a husband should use it to beat his wife — as he has done on Saudi instructional TV programs on wife beating on Iqraa TV.

These kinds of Saudi infomercials could really capitalize on a grotesque, barbaric, and nightmarish reality within the kingdom — to which the international community responds with a deafening silence and shameless paralysis. The other day, for instance, a typical news report emerged out of Saudi Arabia: a 12-year-old girl was sold by her father into marriage with an 80-year-old man. The Saudi father sold her to his cousin, who had previously married three other young girls, for the equivalent of $22,600 U.S. currency.

After the “wedding,” the girl was taken to the hospital because of horrible physical injuries she sustained in the rape that followed the “festivities” — which involves the “wife” and all women forced into a closet and the men “celebrating” in a large room, spending most of the time staring into each other’s eyes. If an outsider was present at this function and didn’t know the “culture,” he would definitely think that a gay wedding, of one form or another, was underway. But not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Eman Al Nafjan, a Saudi blogger and women’s rights advocate, is one of the few courageous voices speaking out against this vicious injustice of child rape in Saudi Arabia. Her voice fills the void left by the shameless silence of the “progressive” left in the West, which dares not speak a word of criticism against Islam, lest doing so might put its anti-Americanism and solidarity with jihadists into jeopardy.

Eman Al Nafjan comments on the case in her blog:

Where else in the world can a man openly say that he is in a polygamous marriage with four underage girls and not get arrested? At this rate we might as well start a tourism industry to attract rich Muslim pedophiles.

Well, yes indeed, and the industry, which really already exists in one way or another, would get the backing of Saudi judges and religious clerics. In April of last year, after all, a Saudi judge refused to grant a divorce to an eight-year-old girl who had been forced into marriage by her father with a 47-year-old man as part of a loan repayment agreement. In August, a 10-year-old “bride” ran away from her 80-year-old husband, seeking safety at her aunt’s house. After several days, she was forcibly returned to her rapist by her father.

Saudi religious leaders obviously come to the vehement defense of these child “marriages.” How could they not, when they have the conduct of their own prophet to serve as a shining example? Indeed, the founder of Islam married Aisha when she was six and “consummated the marriage” with her when she was nine (Bukhari 7.62.88).

But, alas, perhaps I have gone too far. These aren’t really politically correct things to talk about or to condemn in our society. In our mainstream culture, in which the boundaries of discourse are set by the liberal-left, it’s legitimate to endlessly deride and dehumanize Sarah Palin with sinister insults founded on misogynist hate, but to utter even the slightest criticism of Islamic gender apartheid — and its mass crimes against humanity — is really going overboard. Who are we, after all, as my leftist feminist colleagues explained to me for over a decade in academia, to judge other cultures and see them through the eyes of the Western cultural lens? Surely there is no universal standard to judge anyone on anything. Cultural relativism is the way to go. Well, except, that is, when it comes to judging Western civilization in general and American society in particular. That’s when cultural relativism really needs to go out the window.

So don’t be looking for any particularly harsh judgments, let alone even a mentioning, in our liberal-left media about 80-year-old Saudi men raping 12-year-old girls. But do look for lots of insults to be directed at me from leftists who will be more indignant about this article than about the horrific reality it describes — and because I wish to have something done about it (i.e., rescue and protect real suffering innocent little girls). For the left, acknowledging the vicious nature of Islamic misogyny — and coming to the defense of its victims — is unthinkable, since it leads to a recognition of the pernicious nature of adversarial cultures and religions. This, in turn, by necessity leads to an acknowledgement of the superiority of Western civilization and, therefore, most horrifyingly of all, of the legitimacy of defending it. For the left, this is simply anathema.

The Nation magazine, therefore, with its writers like Naomi Klein, who dreams of Muqtada al-Sadr’s killing fields coming to New York, is not the place to search for a condemnation of the rape of underage girls in Saudi Arabia — and of the Islamic theology that institutionalizes and sanctions it. The left’s long tradition is to sacrifice human lives on the altar of its utopian ideas, and so suffering Saudi women and the rest of the millions of Muslim women who are brutalized under Islamic gender apartheid must, tragically, be a part of that heartless and hypocritical progressive ritual of hate.